Best little House race in Texas

There are 36 congressional districts in Texas, but only one — the heavily Hispanic 23rd District — is even remotely competitive.

And, as befitting the Lone Star State’s everything-is-bigger mantra, the seat is as large as it is volatile.

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Stretching 830 miles from El Paso to San Antonio, the district covers 24 percent of Texas’ land mass and a majority of the United States’ border with Mexico. It is larger than 29 states. Driving across it from one end to the other takes nearly eight hours.

That’s a lot of territory Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego must defend from Republican challenger Will Hurd on Tuesday. Gallego is hoping against history: The seat has changed hands three times in the past four elections, with Democrat Ciro Rodriguez knocking off incumbent Henry Bonilla in the 2006 Democratic super-wave, Republican Quico Canseco ousting Rodriguez in the tea party-fueled insurgency of 2010, and Gallego displacing Canseco in 2012.

Election Day may bring yet another Republican wave. But strategists in both parties concede the mild-mannered Gallego, who represented the more Republican western half of the district for years in the state Legislature, has managed to separate himself from the national Democratic brand. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried the district by 5 points, and Sen. Ted Cruz carried it by 10 points.

Gallego insists his constituents won’t just follow the national trends.

“People around here are not particularly partisan,” he said in a phone interview. “They’re very pragmatic. They look at the person rather than vote the party line.”

And when they look at Gallego’s opponent, they will find an unusual résumé. Hurd, spent a decade working undercover for the CIA in the Middle East. Hurd could be the first former CIA officer to serve in Congress since Florida’s Porter Goss, who went on to be CIA director under President George W. Bush.

“There’s nobody in the 435 people who are up there who have my background in national security,” Hurd said before ticking off the foreign policy challenges America faces: withdrawing from Afghanistan, the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the decay of relations with Russia. “These are all issues that I can have an impact on on Day One.”

Even with Hurd’s background, there isn’t much contrast in their positions on foreign policy and intelligence issues; the district is heavily influenced by nearby military installations. While Hurd believes airstrikes against ISIL should have begun earlier, both support military operations in Syria and Iraq and want American allies in the Middle East to contribute more to the fight. They both simultaneously consider Edward Snowden a “traitor” and think the NSA’s spying has gone too far.

But both candidates concede foreign policy isn’t the top issue on voters’ minds. Border security dominates much of the political discussion, and the area is sufficiently conservative that a national Democratic strategist compared Obama’s popularity there to his popularity in West Virginia. But it’s also majority Hispanic.

In early October, Gallego released two ads illustrating the challenge. An English-language spot featured border sheriffs endorsing his candidacy. A Spanish-language spot celebrated the presence of 50 million Hispanics in the country and declares: “By voting, we have the power to make government work for us.”

But Gallego says that, at least in his district, there’s no contradiction in message. He notes his son will be a 10th-generation Texan, and many other Hispanic families have deep roots in the region.

"These are people that have been here and worked here for a very long time," he said.